At some point in an individual’s fitness journey, injuries are going to happen. Most of the time it’s not even the exercise that is the root cause of the injury. The exercise is usually what brings out the deficiencies in the body. Maybe an old baseball injury, or back starts hurting from sitting 10+ hours a day.
Why do injuries occur?
I could write a giant list of why injuries occur but today I am going to talk about the 3 most common reasons I believe they occur.
- LACK OF RECOVERY: An individual may not be recovering properly because of overtraining, not enough mobility work, not enough rest, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, or maybe even too much stress.
- REPETITIVE MOVEMENT: Doing the same movement over and over can lead to aches and pains. Sitting all day everyday is actually a repetitive movement. Typing or mouse clicking is a common cause for shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain. Too much running has caused a lot of issues due to the same muscle groups being overworked.
- TOO MUCH EGO: It is very common in fitness to forget about proper mechanics and put speed and heavy loads first. When an individual starts to do this it will only be a matter of time before the body has enough. If we want to do this for the long haul, which we should, it is crucial to do things correctly.
Now I said it is bound to happen. Everyone will probably experience some sort of nagging injury at some point. I would say it is acceptable to experience this maybe once per year, at the most twice.
If you are noticing these aches and pains more frequent than that, you really need to stop and take a look at your entire situation. Your Training (your gyms programming, your movement, mobility etc), nutrition, sleep, stress, work and lifestyle. Try to get to the root cause of the aches and pain.
If you can’t figure it out, I highly recommend you talk to a professional. A good coach, or physical therapist could probably pinpoint why these nagging injuries are occurring.
HOW DO WE COME BACK FROM INJURY:
- The very first thing we need to do is figure out what is causing the pain. Once we know that we can start our COME BACK. Otherwise it’s just a vicious cycle of pain, take time off, lose fitness, come back, pain again.
- Stop the inflammation. If you have pain anywhere in the body there’s a very good chance you have a lot of inflammation. The quickest way to stop inflammation is, eat good, sleep good, minimize stress, and rest the area of pain. When I say “rest”, I mean keep moving but at low impact, low intensity, and through pain free range of motion. We still want to get fresh blood flow to the affected area which speeds up the healing process.
- Once we stop the inflammation, we need to be very patient and do things the right way. We will gradually re introduce light loads, and moderate intensity with safe movement patterns. Nothing too complex. Remember while we slowly ramp up it is extremely important to stay on top of our mobility work to avoid any relapse.
- We will gradually continue adding in slightly more intensity (meaning speed and load) and more complex movements. The timeline of this process is different for everyone but what I have seen with the most common injuries (if an athlete follows the right protocol) it usually takes around 15 to 30 workouts before being close to 100.
If you are suffering from nagging aches and pains and aren’t sure the best way to approach these injuries just click HERE and we would love to help you figure out the best game plan to get you back on track.
Remember proper movement speeds up the recovery process!!!
